Читать книгу Keeper of Limits: The Mrs. Cavendish Poems - Stephen Dunn - Страница 8

The Young Mrs. Cavendish

Because back then she accepted

almost any problem as the normal state of things

she thought the homeless and the affluent

were just part of the landscape, inevitable as storms

and sunsets. It was easy, she said, such thinking,

and when it wasn’t, it simply wasn’t. I felt like

disavowing her right there, but I rarely knew

what to do in her presence,

found it hard to resist the lilt of her voice,

her blithe carelessness. When she began to use the word

spiritual as if it were something you could study for,

like citizenship, I should have collapsed into laughter.

Let’s embrace our ignorance, I finally said to her,

half-aware I was revealing my own brand of sanctimony.

I remembered for both of us how pleased she was

when we discussed Ayn Rand and free enterprise,

and those years she instructed others in the art

of selfishness. Let the poor work harder,

she’d say, let the strong get stronger. She’d cite

Howard Roark as her man of the hour, would tell

anyone who’d listen that Adam Smith eats Marx

for breakfast. Then she went to college, and there

was the world, fraught with complications

of competing ideas. Now she says

she was an idiot, hadn’t yet tripped over herself

in pursuit of an idea, or lost a job, or had to rely

on the kindness of the unambitious. It took forever

before she could separate the shit from the shinola.